Wilfredo Beltran Alicdan (born February 22, 1965) is a Filipino figurative artist known for paintings of rounded, faceless figures built from simplified geometric forms, often depicting courtship, family life, and children at play. He is a founding member of Anting-Anting, an artists' collective from Cavite, and since 1990 has exhibited in the Philippines, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, India, the United States, and the United Arab Emirates.
Alicdan studied fine arts at the Philippine Women's University and has painted full-time since 1992. Several of his paintings have been reproduced as UNICEF greeting cards, and his work is held in collections that include the De La Salle Medical and Health Sciences Institute. Since 2020 his work has become more explicitly geometric, in the Detour series and the 2021 solo exhibition Geometric Mode, which included works from his Portal View series of paintings made of words. His honors include an honorable mention in the 1989 Metrobank National Painting Competition and the 2007 General Emilio Aguinaldo Outstanding Achievement Award for Visual Arts.
Early life and education Alicdan was born on February 22, 1965, in Dasmariñas, Cavite, the eldest of eight children. He showed a talent for painting from an early age. He finished elementary school at Francisco E. Barzaga Memorial School in Dasmariñas in 1978. He graduated from Immaculate Conception Academy in 1982, where he received a gold medal as "Artist of the Year". He studied fine arts, majoring in painting, at the Philippine Women's University Institute of Fine Arts from 1983 to 1986, graduating with top honors and a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree.
Career 1989–1999: Early career Alicdan received an honorable mention in the 1989 Metrobank National Painting Competition, and in 1990 his work was shown in the United States for the first time, in Pilipino Portfolio at the Fort Mason Center in San Francisco. He held his first solo exhibition, Buhay Pinoy, a show of 30 paintings, at Gallery Genesis in Manila in 1992. According to a 2007 awards profile, the show was well received, and the gallery named him its Discovery Artist for that year. Its scenes of everyday rural life and family bonds, such as Labandera ("Washerwoman"), Paluwas sa Maynila, and Mag-ina ("Mother and Child"), were painted with simple lines and few figures. He was a finalist in the Philippine Art Awards in Makati that year. From then on he worked as a full-time painter, exhibiting in Manila and elsewhere in Asia. One of his paintings, of a young couple seated on a carabao, appeared on the cover of the Sunday Inquirer Magazine on February 13, 1994, for an issue on the theme Romansang Pinoy ("Filipino Romance"). Through the rest of the decade he held solo exhibitions at the Ayala Museum (Sandosenang Eksena, 1993; Paskong Paksiw, 1995; Giliw, 1999) and at the Cultural Center of the Philippines (Sa Paglipad ng mga Lobo, 1994). He also entered the 1996 annual competition of the Art Association of the Philippines, whose catalogue reproduces his entry. His early record was documented in two Peso Book Foundation registries: Award Winners: A Visual Arts Registry (1996), which lists his Metrobank honorable mention, and Kayumanggi: Biographies of Philippine Visual Artists (2000), which carries his biography.
Anting-Anting In the late 1990s Alicdan co-founded Anting-Anting, a collective of artists from Cavite named after the anting-anting, the protective amulet long associated in Philippine popular culture with the province. In its most familiar form the anting-anting is a bronze medallion engraved with figures, symbols, and words, often in Latin, of the kind still sold beside Quiapo Church in Manila. It grew out of the movement of visual artists to Cavite at the time, which brought together Cavite-based artists such as Emmanuel Garibay for informal workshops and group exhibitions. In 1999 its members adopted the name Anting-Anting after accepting a collaborative mural commission that required a legal group entity, and the same year a prominent Caviteño offered them a studio free of charge. By 2009 the collective had 11 members, among them Alfredo Esquillo Jr. and Joseph Lofranco, and its members described a friendship and camaraderie that had outlasted occasional differences and conflicts.
In 2000 the collective received a grant from the Metrobank Foundation for a traveling exhibition. It showed Sa Aming Bakuran at the Vargas Museum that year, and in 2001 Anting-Anting sa MAC at the Madrigal Art Center in Alabang, its third exhibition. Its first major exhibition came in 2002 at the Cultural Center of the Philippines, and the same year it served as a conduit for SUNDU-AN 3, a nationwide project led by the National Commission for Culture and the Arts. Alicdan was among the exhibitors. At the CCP, in the Bulwagang Juan Luna from June 13 to July 31, 14 members showed mixed-media works that treated the anting-anting not as an inert object but as a medium. At the Museo de La Salle, from August 29 to October 30, a show for the 25th anniversary of De La Salle University – Dasmariñas presented works on spirituality and Filipino culture and tradition. In 2003 the group showed Ubod at Boston Gallery and Surrounded by Anting-Anting at Surrounded by Water, both in Cubao, and took part in Dencities at the CCP.
In 2004 Arts Network Asia awarded the collective an exchange and collaborative residency program with the Malaysian collective Matahati, and in 2004 and 2005 the two groups staged joint exhibitions under the title MAGER Nusantara 05. In Kuala Lumpur the two groups held a mural exhibition at the National Art Gallery and a show at Art Salon; in Antipolo their show at Pinto Art Gallery, from February 27 to March 30, 2005, featured interactive paintings alongside individual canvases. The group's contribution in Kuala Lumpur was Perahu Kamalayan (2004), an outdoor mural that Alicdan painted with Esquillo, Garibay, Jose Austria, Lofranco, and Lawrence Borsoto. It envisioned a reversal of poverty in which "victims are vindicated and victimizers are punished". The mural was presented as a collaboration with Matahati, whose members Bayu Utomo Radjikin and Masnoor Ramli Mahmud also worked on it. In 2007 the art quarterly Image: Christ and Art in Asia featured the group's Huling Hapunan ("Last Supper"), which set the scene among junk food and bottles of beer, wine, and soft drinks and drew on the social themes of José Rizal's novels, and reproduced Alicdan's Pakape-Kape. The following year the group exhibited Bisperas at Art Verite Gallery in Serendra, Bonifacio Global City.
By its tenth anniversary few of the members still lived in Cavite, and they had come to regard the group as a barkada, a circle of friends who happened to be artists. The group marked the anniversary in 2009 and 2010 with a three-part cycle on heaven, earth, and hell, shown at three Manila galleries. Salvation History opened the cycle at Tin-Aw Art Gallery in Makati (September 11–30, 2009), where each member offered a personal vision of heaven; Alicdan's contribution was Hagway (2009), a 72 × 48 in oil on canvas. In his essay for the exhibition brochure, the critic Patrick D. Flores read its "heaven" as a kind of desire, "by turns utopian and catastrophic", and described the anting-anting as "the indigenous talisman that is invoked to make things happen". The second show, Lupa ("Earth"), was described by its artists as an attempt to make art work like an anting-anting, warning viewers of the dark forces around them or protecting them from those forces.
The cycle closed in April 2010 with Eternal Damn Nation at Manila Contemporary in Makati, centered on a mural on the 2010 elections that Alicdan painted with the other ten members. The oil on canvas, measuring 108 × 180 in, was the group's picture of hell. Among its dead spirits and ghouls were a crocodile in human form holding a smiling President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo and a dead Rizal with a bullet hole in his head; Manny Pacquiao appeared as a Christ-like figure, and the pierced body of Christ and the Sacred Heart stood for the hope of redemption. A catalogue of the cycle, with essays by Flores, Alice G. Guillermo, Edmundo Orlando, and Siddharta Perez, was published in 2010 and is held by the Asia Art Archive in Hong Kong, and the cycle is discussed in the Philippine visual arts journal Pananaw. The same 11 members were still exhibiting together in 2022.
2000–2009: Paradeisos and Southeast Asia
In 2000 he and Garibay held the two-person show Kasama ("Companion") at Galeriasia, a gallery in Hong Kong's Central district that promoted artists from Asia, from September 20 to October 17. A listing in the South China Morning Post on opening day, which called the show "Two Filipino Artists", characterized Garibay's paintings as "intense abstract" and "precise realistic" works and Alicdan's as "charming naive" works. Reviewing the show in the same paper nine days later, Amanda Watson described Alicdan's paintings as simple, charming narratives of contemporary Filipino life rendered in flat colors, with sparse detail and "studied" body language, and suggested he had arrived at his career almost by accident. She contrasted his work with that of Garibay, a founding member of the collective Sanggawa, whose intense, socially committed paintings she described as social realism. Although the two seemed to have little in common, she wrote, both painted people and the human condition, and together they gave a sense of where Filipino art was heading.
Paradeisos, his sixth solo exhibition, opened at Liongoren Gallery in Cubao on April 24, 2002, and moved to Kaloob Hall in Makati Cinema Square from May 13 to 31. Reviewing it in the Philippine Daily Inquirer, Gino Dormiendo observed that in an age of globalization and information technology Alicdan's work "may seem preposterously anachronistic". Since Buhay Pinoy, he wrote, the painter had kept to the Filipino nuclear family in a rural setting, its members engaged in folk activities from prayer and celebration to play and leisure. With Paradeisos, however, the 37-year-old had "surprisingly chosen to mark a new chapter" in his career. About half of the 16 works left behind his usual square canvases for vertical and horizontal formats, the figures were stretched beyond their familiar round shapes, and solid hues gave way to the colors of fruits and flowers.
Song for Grace, a diptych, paired a full-bodied figure of his new wife, Grace, the work's namesake and his muse, with a dark figure of a violinist standing for the artist. Paradeisos (Luke 43) showed Christ on Calvary between the two thieves, the unrepentant one and the one who repented and was saved, with the bodies turned away so that only their contours conveyed the agony of the scene. In Hope a mother holds her baby while her two older children play with the youngest. The largest work, Ritual at the Entrance, which Dormiendo thought uncharacteristic of the artist, showed a nude couple playing a flute and a small guitar, their bodies marked by calligraphic brushstrokes. Dormiendo acknowledged complaints about the "grossly inflated" bodies of his women but defended them as figures of Mother Earth, whose roles from giving birth to nurturing life called for bodies "strong, hefty and rotund". With this celebration of women, children, and family, he concluded, Alicdan had "regained his paradise".